diversity for sale

"Selling Ethnicity"

By Marilyn Halter
Washington Post, Sunday, July 16, 2000; Page B03

Walk along the aisles of your local grocery store, and you'll find more salsa than ketchup on the shelves. The spicy Mexican condiment has been outselling the American staple since 1991. There will be kimchi and couscous, and you'll probably find your mind wandering to recipes for Szechuan beef or shish kebabs instead of meatloaf. Minority appeal has gone mainstream--and we've come to take it for granted.

The diverse produce you'll find there is not simply a reflection of our ethnic diversity. It is also evidence of a recent but profound change in how Americans think of themselves, in what being American is all about. Over the past few years, politicians and social scientists have been trying to measure whether today's immigrants are adapting to the ways of their adopted land as previous generations have done. But they seem to be missing another equally important question: How is America adapting to the ways of its immigrants?

The shift is a pervasive one. U.S. companies now spend close to $2 billion a year on advertising designed to win the attention of new immigrants and capture the loyalty of minority customers, whose buying power is estimated at more than $1 trillion annually and who are eager to acquire the markers of their cultural heritage. And while identifying with a specific ethnic group used to be associated with lower-class standing, recent studies show that getting back to one's roots and getting ahead financially go hand in hand.

It's hard to recall how quickly this change has come about. Just three decades ago, being American often meant distancing yourself from your ancestry. As anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote in her essay, "Ethnicity and Anthropology in America," which was published in 1975: "Being American is a matter of abstention from foreign ways, foreign food, foreign ideas, foreign accents." While earlier generations of immigrants typically wanted to become part of the mainstream as rapidly as possible, more recent immigrants--or their children and grandchildren--often study the language of their ancestors, eat ethnic cuisine, display ethnic artifacts, even change their names back to the old-country original. The irony is that these changes--which began in the '70s among people who were looking for more personal forms of expression than the marketplace had to offer--are now fostered, even promoted, by our mainstream corporate culture.

In the past, minorities were rarely targeted as consumers. Despite the huge influx of southern and eastern European immigrants in the early part of the 1900s, none appeared in the imagery of the newly evolving advertising industry. And depictions of African Americans were limited to porters, washerwomen and janitors, and reduced to simple caricatures and trademark figures like Aunt Jemima. They were often used to sell products associated with blackness--shoe polish, coal stoves, black thread--to white customers.

All that changed during the last third of the 20th century. Just as immigration policy was liberalized in the mid-1960s, opening wide the doors to immigrants primarily from Asian and Latin American countries, traditionally oppressed groups began to press for greater recognition. The black nationalist movement was quickly followed by the stirrings of a new Chicano militancy. These largely political initiatives spawned a new interest in finding roots and celebrating distinctive heritages. By the mid-1970s, white descendants of immigrants--such as Italians, Jews and Poles--who had arrived almost a century beforehand and faced discrimination from the native population at that time, began to assert their own brand of ethnic pride.

This so-called "roots" phenomenon accounts for such familiar developments as the growth of ethnic celebrations, a zeal for genealogy, increased travel to ancestral homelands and greater interest in ethnic artifacts, cuisine, music, literature and, of course, language. It also accounts for a change in the pattern of immigrant behavior: Assimilation began to take second place to cultural pluralism. The country itself began to show more of the change.

One of the strongest influences on this cultural change was the simultaneous evolution of modern capitalism. Mass marketing--and the generic advertising it produced--had reached its peak in the early 1970s and began to wane later in that decade. By then, the similarity of manufacturing techniques meant that most customers could no longer distinguish between one product and another. As Yuri Radzievsky, founder of YAR Communications, a brand management firm, put it, "Products are coming closer and closer to each other. When you pick up a phone and hear a dial tone, can you say whether it's AT&T, MCI, Sprint or anybody else?"

Think about it: How can you tell Coke from the Pepsi you have spilled on your clothes? Between the Tide and Cheer you use to launder them? Or between the value and services offered by Westinghouse versus Kenmore washing machines? Marketers began to look for new ways to hook consumers. Enter niche marketing--in particular, marketing to specific ethnic groups. As Radzievsky says, "You need to get on the home turf of that person. What's home turf? It's culture."

AT&T, one of YAR's clients, put Radzievsky's ideas to work. The company began an advertising campaign in 1995 that focused on customers who call relatives and friends outside the United States, looking to attract immigrants and ethnic minorities even though the vast majority of their long-distance calls were made within the country. The highly successful national campaign created print, broadcast, direct and community event-based advertising in nearly 20 languages--to Americans of Irish, Jewish, Italian, Greek, German and French descent. There were even special promotions pitched specifically to those least "ethnic" of ethnics, Anglo-Americans, featuring British customs and idiosyncratic turns of phrase.

The market is there: There are now at least 35 million blacks, 30 million Hispanics and 10 million Asians in America. That's a total of 75 million people, or one-quarter of the nation's current population, who are minorities. Add to that the fact that the number of immigrants living in the United States has tripled since 1970, rising to nearly 27 million, or nearly one in 10 residents--the highest proportion in seven decades. Whether it is catering to members of long-standing ethnic groups or new minorities, the marketplace is the great leveler. From kente cloth to Claddagh rings, the goods being sold make the same appeal to cultural identity--they tug at the same emotional purse strings.

Merchants of all kinds are anxious to attract--and keep--this growing market. That's why you can now choose from more than 300 Hallmark greeting cards en espanol, order a canister of jalapeno rugelach, pay for it with a Lunar New Year designer check and send it in an envelope with a Cinco de Mayo postage stamp. You can pick out your wedding dress at a Greek, Hispanic or African bridal show, or select from as many as 147 different shades of Cover Girl makeup. (The skin care industry takes literally the phrase that the complexion of America is changing.)

Perhaps nothing better illustrates the extent to which the ethnic revival has permeated our culture than renowned baby and child care expert T. Berry Brazelton's comment: "Every baby should get to know their heritage." These days, roots training comes even before potty training. The Gerber Corp., for example, has come out with a new line of baby foods called Gerber Tropicals designed for Hispanic families. In its advertising, however, it is clear that the company has larger aims. Not content to corner the Latino market, it is touting the 16 different varieties, such as mangoes, papayas, and beans and rice, for their tasty and nutritional appeal to babies of all ethnic backgrounds.

Of course, all these foods and traditions are evolving under the influence of America's sophisticated consumer society. Ethnic festivals, with their rows of street vendors, organized tours to visit the homeland, special programs in universities, and museums dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of ethnic history and culture, have flourished--and sometimes taken on increased significance--in this country.

And sometimes the influence of America's corporate culture creeps back to the land where the traditions originated. Take St. Patrick's Day. The holiday has become a hugely popular event in the United States, celebrated coast-to-coast with lavish parades and bystanders dressed in green. With some 40 million Americans claiming some form of Irish ancestry, interest in making purchases with an Irish theme peaks during March. Early in the month, the Home Shopping Network holds a 24-hour, all-Irish merchandise event, while book and record stores promote Irish titles.

Now, the influence of the American marketplace has spilled over to Ireland itself. Over the past couple of decades, increasing numbers of Irish Americans have made March excursions to the Emerald Isle to coincide with St. Patrick's Day festivities. But the roots-seeking American tourists were disappointed to find only a minor religious holiday in place of the celebrations they had grown accustomed to here. The Irish tourism minister recognized the problem--and the potential--when he was marching with a contingent of Irish Americans from his native County Mayo in New York City's elaborate St. Patrick's Day parade. As a result, in 1996 the Irish Tourist Board launched a marketing campaign to capitalize on the swell of American interest. Now Irish Americans who make their mid-March pilgrimage "home" can find all the merry-making and meaning-making they could ever want. Last year, more than half a million people lined the streets to watch the parade in Dublin alone, part of a new, week-long extravaganza to mark St. Patrick's Day on Irish soil.

From pizza to clogs, foods and goods that once had specific ethnic overtones have been absorbed into America's mainstream market. The distinction between dominant and minority cultures is blurring: Dunkin' Donuts uses Yiddishisms to urge customers of any heritage to try out its new bagels, with billboards that say "It's Worth the Schlep." Meanwhile, consumer shopping patterns have come full circle. Many now make purchases not as a way of emulating some national ideal, but rather of distinguishing themselves from the bland American mainstream.

It was commentator Leonard Fein, noting the popularity of the bagel, who recognized that the anxiety many immigrants feel about what they lose as they assimilate is often ill-founded. "At long last, I have figured it out," he wrote in the Forward, a Jewish weekly. "No, there is no need for us to be troubled by assimilation, that traditional terror of American Jewish life. Not, mind you, that there isn't assimilation. Very much of it. But it works in exactly the opposite direction from what we've been led to believe. It is not the Jews who are assimilating into America; it is America that is assimilating into the Jews."

Whether it is the Americanization of bagels or salsa, the distinction between dominant and ethnic subcultures is blurring. America has adapted.

Marilyn Halter is an associate professor of history at Boston University and the author of "Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity," which will be published by Schocken Books in September.